"
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

~ Marcel Proust.

﻿

Greetings!

According to my holiday calendar, the first Sunday in August is National Friendship Day. I believe that friendships should be celebrated every day, but it's fun to have a designated day to focus on the most meaningful friendships in your life.

The definition of friendship is "the relationship between friends," but what is a friend? I use the word friend with discretion because not everyone we know is necessarily a friend. We might have a lot of acquaintances or colleagues, but a friend is more special. A friend is someone you can count on. What's your definition of a friend?

In Gratitude(memoir) by Jenny Diski. As a memoirist, I often try to categorize memoirs into categories, but this one just doesn't have a category except for being just plain great. It's part memoir, part rant and rebellion by a Bohemian and very original thinker. Diski's writing pulls you in from the beginning, and as someone who has led quite an interesting life, she certainly has a great many stories to tell. One of her more fascinating ones is being taken in at the age of fifteen by writer Doris Lessing, and how that experience affected the person she became.

Like myself, Diski is a cancer survivor, but she never wanted the illness to define her, nor did she want to be a victim of it. However, she does share what it's like being told that the end of your life is near, and what that means for the life you're presently leading. I could not put this book down. Highly recommended, and many thanks to my dear friend Judith Citrin for suggesting it to me.